mister stoopid visits bookofjoe

Last night when I went to bed I glanced at the little box that shows my high-speed/no-speed cable modem status and noticed that the second green light from the right was solid instead of blinking on and off.

Just for the heck of it I noodled around on my bedside iMac and the speed was mos def "Comcastic."

See, after several years I've learned that steady green means my high-speed internet is up and running.

But that's funny, I thought, since my laptop downstairs, where bookofjoe happens from astride my treadmill, has been offering dial-up only for the past 40 hours, yet another in a series of pretty much daily outages ranging in length from minutes to hours.

There's a reason I call myself a TechnoDolt™ and try to explain to everyone who offers tips on tags, toolbars and their ilk that I don't know a bit from a bitter and therefore can't benefit from any of the well-intentioned help that comes my way on a regular basis.

So I decided to try an experiment this morning, when I awoke to the very same situation re: modem box solid upstairs/dial-up only downstairs.

I unplugged the phone jack from the side of my treadmill PowerBook.

Guess what?

Instead of the speeds you see up top, which are what my dial-up connection's been giving me to work with the past two days, all of a sudden I got the blistering numbers below.

And thus you get perhaps another glimmer of why I'm a crash test dummy for the brain-dead.

Oh, yeah, mister stoopid up top: it wasn't a very long trip — just to the mirror.

I guess you could say that the "L" in LAN around here stands for "Limited."